[bluefish]

I'd be surprised if the Craigslist team doesn't "..give a shit about their own site". On the contrary, I'm quite sure they care about it very much. Perhaps they're not interested in doing more via features and would rather spend their time doing things like setup the Craigslist Foundation (http://craigslistfoundation.org/). The thing about Craigslist is that it's dead simple, which is appealing to most people who use the web and don't want to understand what's going on under the hood. Something like an API might entertain you and I but I doubt it would serve their larger user base.

Still as others have posted, nothing is stopping someone else from coming along and creating CL service that's just better than CL itself. I would welcome one, especially one that handled rental listings better, but I'm not going to hold my breath.